American Motors Rambler Fender And Dent Repair - Learn How To Fix A Dent

This is where the gym membership or the couple of beers come in handy. Most of the pressure has been relieved from pounding out the two peaks, but simply grabbing the fender and pulling it finishes the job. Note how flat the original cracked area above the lip contour has become? Time to finish it off.

Hammers
Here is a quick lesson concerning body hammers. The top hammer is called a shrinking hammer because its waffled face contacts less metal per swing, therefore causing the metal to be stretched less. The hammers with flat faces could also be called pick hammers. Both can be used with a dolly on the back side of the panel to pound an area flat, or in some cases, make it concave.

There are two techniques for using the hammer and dolly. Shown here is off-dolly; it gives room for the metal to be pressed through to the dolly to get a bulge to lie down. You guessed it; hammer-on-dolly is used to flatten small ripples on an area of metal.

Using hammer-on-dolly, we worked the peak above the lip contour. It didn't take much because we had already relieved the pressure in this area. Unfortunately, we also uncovered a pile of filler from a previous repair.

The problem with the filler is that it was used to cover previous damage instead of fixing it correctly and prevented us from releasing the rest of the stress. We tried a bigger hammer. Nope, the filler in that area had to come off.

Leaving the filler mess for later, we switched to a contour dolly and went after the big push-in dent. The trick here is to go for the high spots around the dent rather than trying to push out the dent itself.

A couple of quick strikes and the tension was relieved and the lower dent began to come out. The dolly can also be used as a small hammer behind the dent to help it along with several small blows. It's important to do this in order. If you try to pound out the dent from the back then move to the top and work out the high spot, the dent below will bulge. Always start with the peak to push metal back into the dent area.

We didn't want to try to work the metal any more than we had to. Look at sheetmetal like pizza dough; the more you work it, roll it out, and pound on it, the thinner and therefore wider it becomes. Thin metal where the dent used to be will pop in and out like an old oil can and end up making the dent huge.

The last part of pulling the upper push-in dent was relieving the stress on the rear of the fender by pulling it with a slide hammer; the more we pulled, the less the dent was evident.